TRENDS & TECHNOLOGY
Launching a Website? Here’s What You Need to Know Tips for Tackling Your New Website Project and Best Practices to Improve Website Speed, Performance, and Optimization. BY THOMAS J. ARMITAGE, SITE-SEEKER, INC.
W Tom Armitage is part of the sales team at Site-Seeker, a boutique digital marketing agency based in Upstate NY. He earned his master’s in integrated marketing communication from West Virginia University and bachelor’s in public relations from Utica College of Syracuse University. After holding marketing/PR roles at Sovena and Overit, Tom joined the Site-Seeker team in 2013.
ebsites have come a long way over the past two decades. It might sound cliche, but things were a lot easier then. It was possible to get away with a simple site and basic search engine optimization (SEO) before seeing loads of success in terms of traffic, form fills, and sales. But, like anything in the technology world, things have gotten a lot more complicated. Websites can now be fully customized and come equipped with all sorts of rich features that can improve customer experience. It’s important that website managers are mindful of the necessary steps involved in properly launching and maintaining a website — lest they run the risk of seeing negative impacts in search engine rankings and conversion rates.
THE IMPORTANCE OF WEBSITES
Despite a rapidly changing landscape, websites continue to be the lifeblood of most organizations’ marketing programs. Marketing and sales can take place in all sorts of places and platforms - from in-person to social media to email - but websites remain the “home base” where conversions take place. That’s why so much time, effort, and resources are put into websites. B2B companies should continue building a new website every 3-5 years. That’s because, over that time, company goals may be updated, trends tend to change, new features become popular, Google’s algorithm is tweaked, companies go through branding
redoes, and, sometimes it’s good to just have a fresh new look.
BEFORE GOING LIVE
There are a number of items that go into building a new website. Most teams follow a similar process. It usually consists of some version of the following: • Planning • Sitemap • Wireframe • Design • Development • SEO and content • Testing • Tracking setup • Launch It can be an intense amount of work, especially if the website is large. But, beyond those notable steps/items, here are some other - often overlooked - areas to be mindful of. 1) Choosing A Theme
Most websites sit on some sort of content management system (CMS). Wordpress is the most popular of the bunch - powering more than 450 million websites and the clear market share leader. Websites built through Wordpress (or another CMS) can be either custom-built or lean on a templated framework. Templates, sometimes called Themes, have grown in popularity, as the number of options and features have become almost endless. Winter 2022 • 97
